reflections on myth, politics, and desire

the comfort of enemies, or two unconsciousnesses

September 24, 2009

So, how interesting. As the terrible stuck-ness that framed our political debate in the dying years of Mbeki’s reign recedes, we are entering a time when the national debate seems both hopeful and frightening. Hopeful, because so many things are up for discussion again, and because there is space for a new, more grounded realism. Frightening because of the ugliness and narrowness that so many of us seem to allow ourselves.

On the whole, it is a time of interesting, alarming crisis. Everything is on the boil; every national institution is in trouble. The first lot of can-do technocrats are looking somewhat crestfallen. Although there have been some success stories (we’re good at collecting tax!) there have been some massive blapses (quite a lot in fact: think Eskom, SABC, SAA; think JSC, Telkom, OBE; think communications policy!) We’re speeding down a twisty mountain pass — and folks, the bus belongs to SA Roadlink. But we’ve not rolled over the cliff’s edge yet, and there’s some benefit in our current situation. To be sure: some of the disasters are truly dire. Of all that’s happened, the horrendous legacy of Mbeki’s HIV / AIDS policy and the massive betrayal (I can think of no other word) of our youth by our education policy and institutions will cast long dark shadows over our future: here Nkosazana Zuma, Mbeki, Manto, Bhengu, and their ilk have truly done us lasting damage. But most of the other problems, though serious, are fixable. Our political class have learned that they are not infallible – or if they haven’t, the voters have. There’s a lot of egg on a lot of faces. The shine is off the rainbow nation: we’re battered, bruised and tarnished. Nationally, you might even call it a depressing time

And that’s good news. For remember what Melanie Klein, for one, had to say about depression. The depressive position, she argued, was a developmental stage. It arises when the infant realises that Bad Mom and Good Mom are one and the same: when fantasies of magical redemption and fantasies of endless persecution make way for something much more painful, and much more healing: living in the real world, whose sweetness can only truly be experienced when we realise that we are alone, that we will die, that everything’s a fuckup: that I’m not magical, and neither are you, and we have to start the difficult business of being grown-ups — a thankless task, really, but can you show me an alternative?

Robert Bly writes about this in a lovely little poem called Where we must look for help. When Noah was drifting on the flood, looking for land, neither the eagle nor the dove or the ‘split-tailed swallow’ were of much help: it was the crow that came back with mud on its feet. ‘The crow, the crow, the spider-coloured crow / the crow shall find new mud to walk upon.’ I love that line, because I love the icon of the crow, the harsh-voiced bird that, in myth, speaks unlovely truths; and that in real life survives on roadkill, wily and alert. And I think what hope there is for South Africa lies in our ability not to find a highway to the future, but to ground ourselves in that black unlovely muck. We need to find ways to enter this dark, humbling and unheroic time: a time when we can give up the magical, romantic projection onto the ‘Beloved country’ and forgive it — forgive ourselves for being what we are.

The problem with the depressive position is that it’s so damn depressing. You have to stop dreaming of the country beyond the rainbow, and start thinking about the difficult, humbling, limited interventions: the triage required of us in the here and how. But then, there is nothing that forces you to do this. Why bother? You could also keep on investing more and yet more energy in the attempt to keep the dream of Dreamland going.

This is the frightening bit. For as the smoke of the Mbeki-versus-Zuma battle clears, and as the outlines of a new terrain of struggle are slowly revealed, it is evident that there is a powerful dynamic in our country centering on the desire to stay with blindness.

This is the way of the split-tailed swallow in Bly’s poem, and at the moment, it takes the shape of two unconsciousnesses: two parallel, competing and yet deeply complementary discourses of reality-denial. The one belongs to the camp that is forming itself around the likes of Julius Malema, Judge John Hlophe, Andile Mngxitama and their entourage: a camp that projects themselves as the voice of pro-African transformation, as the enemy of white domination; but which in reality can only speak from the place of powerlessness and victimhood. The problem with this group is not only their narrow ethnocentrism, their essentialist, racist, homophobic take on what African identity must be. It is not only that this discourse seems to function mainly as a way of providing ideological cover fire for the self-aggrandisement and enrichment of a particularly narrow-minded, bigoted section of our middle class. It is that as far as I can see (and I am on the white side of the fence, mind you!) the black subjectivity being articulated here is utterly disempowered, because it seems to pivot on a refusal of the possibility of a black person being held accountable (by anyone). Thus even the awful Leonard Chuene has been told by the ANCYL that he should not apologise for his lies about Caster Semenya. Now it is plainly true that there are many white racists who see corruption or incompetence everywhere, even where it isn’t. But the tragedy for our national process is that it is now seems increasingly possible for those who really are corrupt, or delusional, or who have acted foolishly, to accuse any and all critics of racism, or of resistance to transformation. Where is the honour, where is the power, where is the leadership in that? Frank Talk – the real one, not his pale imitator – must be spinning in his desolate, almost forgotten, little-honoured grave.

The second discourse is the mirror inverse of the first, its ‘racial’ and ideological twin. It is the voice of white denial, of a narrow, ideological, illiberal liberalism that refuses to acknowledge the persistence of racialised power relations and the ideological legacy of white supremacy in post 1994 South Africa. It uses the semblance of non-racialism (an insistence on ‘colour blindness’, lip-service to meritocracy) to sabotage the equitable transformation of unequal ‘race’ relations. While never overtly racist, it pursues the agenda of protecting the vested interests of the privileged white elite created by Apartheid, by wrapping the interests of this elite in a discourse about ‘world class cities’, global ‘standards’, governance and crime.

These days, this second voice has become less strident: instead of speaking flamboyantly and accusingly from the centre it tends to mutter bitterly from the shadows. I’ve remarked on some of its manifestations before, when I’ve written on Huntley and Disgrace. But it’s not only the voice of elite alienation or white underclass complaint. You can find its views confidently articulated in the mainstream as well, most obviously in the bumptious arrogance of the Democratic Alliance which, despite its own chequered history, acts as if it has the franchise on clean government; and which, though protesting always that it is not racist, has made its political mark by playing forcefully and effectively to white and ‘coloured’ fears.

The interesting thing about these two discourses is that though they appear formally opposed, they’re really deeply co-dependent. They’re enemies, but the emnity is of that special kind: it is that comforting emnity that exists where each adversary finds in the existence of the other proof of their own deepest, fondest fears and the vindication of their stance. The comforting enemy is the person without whom you would not be yourself, to whom you only have to glance to find the validation of your fear and rage. This is perhaps most richly illustrated in the cringe-making performances of Messrs Malema and Shivambu. Shivambu, you will recall, attained national notoriety for his blustering response to those who challenged him about his allegations that DA premier Helen Zille slept with her white colleagues. Malema’s most recent escapade even more tawdry: he stands accused of beating up a neighbour who came to complain about a noisy housewarming and now denies those allegations, saying that it is all all a plot by the spies of Helen Zille. This is so silly that I do not know whether to laugh or cry; our dear GodZille is famous for not knowing how to pick her fights, but the idea of she and her cabinet of aged pale males plotting deep into the night to trip up Julius is worthy of a second-rate Hayibo story, not of serious political discourse.

Helen Zille at the announcement of her all-male, white dominated provincial cabinet

But of course the compliment’s returned. Where would the DA and its ilk be without the Africanist axis? Chris Roper has publicly declared his love-hate affair with Malema , but he’s not the only one. Just as Hlophe casts himself as the agent of African transformation without actually lifting a finger to change anything material in the judiciary, white DA denialism is content to look at Hlophe and their crowd and merely find in their existence confirmation that at root, this is a continent of Idi Amins. Or more properly, this is a continent in which any African politican has got to be either a Nelson Mandela (magically statesmanlike, laundered of all white fears, ‘transcending’ their local roots) or one of a set of interchangeable, indistinguishable goons. They are not able to engage with the very real difficulties and political threats posed by the rise of xenophobic, conservative and authoritarian African essentialism, because firstly they cannot acknowledge the need for social transformation which that essentialism attempts to appropriate for its own ends, and secondly they cannot see African politics other than through their colonial-racial lenses. Through this lens, African demands for change are not responses to real problems, but the expression of an essential corruption and a primal irrationality. This evident, for example, in the media-pillorying of Malema’s school achievement. (Personally I must say that I have no problem with his 20% for woodwork, if that was ever his grade: I must confess that I did not do much better in that messy, unforgiving discipline ). More subtly, it is also evident in the way white attitudes to Zuma have flip-flopped in the past year. Present-day white relief at the fact that he seems to be a pretty competent president is a direct correlate of the way he was turned into a black bogeyman in the days running up to Polokwane.

It seems to me this kind of thing can run and run. On the one side, the smug and dull refusal to recognise the reality of entrenched racial inequalities and colonial mentality; on the other an increasingly shrill Afrocentrism that calls for a ‘debate on race’ while trying to simplify and flatten all discourse on racial problems. Everything done by the one side will justify the excesses of the other. No doubt at a certain level this will be gratifying to those involved. But what is lost is the opportunity for a real and sensible debate on what can be done to address Apartheid’s legacy.

That is why I think it is necessary to say, with as much gentleness as possible: a pox on both your houses. That is why I agree with Zackie Achmat’s refusal to give politicsweb the right to publish his criticisms of John Hlophe. Charting a genuinely anti-racist politics depends, I think, on the ability to wrest the debate away from these mutually constituted, co-dependent, ideologically narrow, blinded camps. Creating a democratic South Africa, where we can encounter one another in new ways, less shaped by predetermined paths mapped out for us by Apartheid society, requires that we map out a third terrain, beyond these two mirroring unconsciousnesses.

To live on this terrain is, as I’ve said, to some extent a saddening business. It requires an honest tally of the losses and the recognition of irreversible damage. It means foregoing the illusory safety brought by high walls and gated suburbs, and entering into a real relation with our fellow citizens. It means letting go of many heroic dreams. Instead of trying to make an entirely new South Africa, unstained by its past, I fear that we may be reduced to trying to make the present one more livable, more merciful, more various, more kind.

But that’s not a bad thing to do. It does not require the abandonment of a radical politics; in fact I think it requires its enlargement. I think it requires the addition, alongside the awareness of large scale social injustice, a more fine-grained, interpersonal and existentialist concern. A door, one of Le Guin’s characters says in one of her short stories, is opened by a very small thing — a key. Liberation is not liberation if it has not rooted itself in our fragile bodies, if we cannot live it in the freedom and authenticity of our everyday encounters.

I would like to try to abjure the rough power of the simplistic splitting that turns our multifarious country into ‘two nations.’ I would like to learn to live without the comfort of enemies. Not in the promised land, but in the gefokte land. I think we will find that there is much to love there.

Why, Crow, do I see images of Mad Max mixed with Soylent Green in your piece? One an apocalyptic wasteland, the other an overcrowded and starving world.

Perhaps that is the way we are in SA: driving through the massive Karoo gives no hint of the squalor of Khayalitsha or Soweto. On one hand we have a government that has no shortage of jam for itself – but from the outside it appears to be a mad squabbling thunder-dome in Polokwane where only the hangers-on get any crumbs. Rough Justice? We should be so lucky.

Is the dream of the crow for less road-kill on the way to the kingdom?

Yes, there are many at the trough. Personally I think the Blademobile is a particularly egregious symbol of this excess. But the BMW-drivers are not going unchallenged. Every corrupt or foolish act is being fiercely criticised, from MANY sides.

What I love about South Africa right now is that for the first time in many years, it feels like we’re living in a democracy. It’s a fuckup, to be sure. But look at the intensity of the national debate, and its complexity. Look at the fierceness with which so many of us are struggling to define what South Africa is, and who we are within it. The space for critical debate – and for transformative action – is larger than it’s been for many years.

Yeah, well. Democracy is doomed to failure because “the majority” is usually comprised of the less educated and therefore more easily manipulated people. And ignorant people elect ignorant governments.

If you are really interested in seeing a utopian South Africa, stop bleating and start doing. Overhauling the education system to ensure the production of free-thinking men and women would be a start in the right direction. All education systems have been reduced to psychiatric and psychological test-beds for the express purpose of the production of government-approved sheep, cattle, goats and cannon-fodder.

Children are our future. Doesn’t matter what you do now if you don’t get to the root of the issue and fix them by ensuring that education produces people who can think and act independently or with groups for the good of all.

It is possible. Consider: If education was resolved today, in ten years you’d have a whole generation of free-thinkers …

Solutions to education do not require large sums of money, rather a change in attitude and approach: teaching students how to study independently, how to evaluate data and not to simply be hypnotized and buy the party line.

Education Alive (in SA) and Applied Scholastics (elsewhere) have answers. There are other issues and there are other solutions. Drugs, immorality, you name it. But a proper education would tend to be a universal solvent for these and other ills because truly educated people tend to approach life more rationally.

Let the politicians rattle their sabers and strut and posture while fixing our children so they can take care of the future.

It’s all very well to write (somebody has to do it) but let’s write from the viewpoint that something can be done about it. Something, as it turns out, that is very, very simple and fits about any pocketbook.

Bleating? I beg your pardon, sir. That’s not the way we are accustomed to address one another on this blog, dinosaur or not. I’ll let it go this once.

In any case, I think you’ve entirely misunderstood me. A ‘utopian South Africa’ is precisely NOT what I am interested in. Or at least, not in any narrow literal sense. The hip hop artist KRS-1 says, somewhere that ‘my nationality is reality’. I’m with him.

Neither do I agree that democracy is doomed to failure. It is always in peril, even in societies that supposedly have their education system sorted out. Check out what the right is doing in the USA. But yes, education’s good. Personally, I think everyone in South Africa should work their way, at least once, through Irving M Copi’s Introduction to Logic, and John Wilson’s Thinking with Concepts. But I wouldn’t deny you the vote because you haven’t.

My point is that there’s no simple solutions. Especially not in education. I’m interested in a conversation that starts with that realisation. If you can’t, then, why, you’re just as bad as the politicians. That’s how I see it. Sorry.

DippleyDokus, are you on FB? Are you an education activist? If you are, please tell me.
My view is agency takes off where one begins to realise the limits of idealism. And that’s what the majority of Safricans have to do. Even though many black people live difficult lives, they still have ‘hope’ and a belief in their own elected government. We should ditch ‘hope’ and pick up agency.

@ Dippleydokus – I agree that democracy is doomed to failure and rather fancy the idea of an open society. The only snag is that we are living in Africa and are surrounded by a rather large crowd of singularly uneducated people ….. so I agree with you, we need to educate and educate and then educate some more. It’s not enough that we teach our children to read and write and it’s certainly not a good idea if our leaders can do neither.

The biggest problem we face is the political leaders – across the board, especially those that are empire building.

To the writer – this is probably one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time. Kudos to you.

And be careful about these generalizations of ‘large crowds of uneducated people’. I am not sure education is the issue here. I know some older black South Africans who are quite illiterate, and who hold the values of democracy and tolerance. And some highly educated whites and blacks whose views are narrow and intolerant.

I think the real danger to democracy in this country is inequality. Our constitutional order cannot stand long, if millions of people are excluded from its economy. Note, that I did not say, perceive themselves to be excluded. I said, are excluded.

You misspelt “Polokwane”. It’s neither written nor pronounced with the h.

Other than that, I really can’t add much because not only do I agree with your main points, I also have absolutely no idea what it is you’re saying! Perhaps I should read it again…

It may LOOK like we’re finally seeing Zille and Zuma’s true colours, but it wouldn’t be the first time that we thought we had figured them out. We shouldn’t discount the possibility that our opinions of them will radically change once again in future.

You again have articulated what I feel intuitively, but cannot elucidate. For now I’ll put aside the white denial/ Huntlicisation/ aracial-racism thing, engaged with too much of that on Thought Leader!.

The emergence of a predatory black elite is the post-colonial condition. I have always asked myself, how do you fight it.

I have decided they cannot be fought successfully on middle-class turf.
For it is on that terrain that they can exploit “race”.

These muthafkas (or racial entrepreneurs as a colleague calls them) know that their bread is buttered so long as the poor, unemployed/ underemploued majority can identify with them racially, through a shared social distaste for white arrogance, through that bond of resentment (understandable) that blacks share for unapologetic white entitlement.

Thus, no amount of debate, invective, vitriol in the Sunday Times will be sufficient to stop them. It may impede them, slightly, cause them to misstep, trip up a bit. But they are gunning for power and our democratic institutions will not withstand the onslaught. It’s the postcolonial South; the true struggle for freedom is against our own, all along we thought the invaders were the problem! The scales fall of our eyes, the Mandela afterglow comes to an end. We have work to do.

Where these people should be confronted the heaviest is on black terrain, in black languages, to an audience of mostly black people.

Look how much respect Athol Trollip earned in the Eastern Cape. Basically, white that he is, he was not the kind of character you could easily delegitimise because his fluency in Xhosa took debate out of the ‘colonial masters’ cultural domain. In a way, symbolically discarding white associations and debating with his parliamentary colleagues from a shared reference. You can call Trollip umlungu all you want behind his back, but it cannot be said so easily to his face, because he will tell you off in your mother tongue. (That was Not a DA advert, please!)

Far more debate is required on our African language stations. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I’m saying there is far more diversity in the range of topics on SAfm then say than on Umhlobo Wenene. The debate leader in SABC radio news is an English-language station. I am not sure what the state of UKhozi FM content is these days because I don’t live in KZN, in the late 1990s/2000s it was brilliant. But I suspect that it may have suffered a few knocks in the Snuki years.

Until we shift the centre of the battle out of middle-class terrain, where so much debate is polarised; we’re in trouble.

Our middle-class is too small to wield the kind of political power that our counterparts in developed countries do. We have delusions of grandeur. We think we punch above our own weight, but the populist turn in democratic South Africa shows us that we are not quite so significant. I’m not saying we’re politically impotent, but we’re not that scary either.

If we are serious about defeating the Afro-essentialists, then we should throw out lot in with the working-class and unemployed. Take our skills, education and debates where Malema least expects to hear it – over my grandmother’s wireless (radio oh bujwa’s not internet!). We need more Asikhulume’s across the board, more Xolani Gwalas and Somadoda Fikenis.

Andries, I’m so loving your essay/blogs – they are stimulating and encouraging in a particular way. Because it feels like you are opening a new space for a new kind of debate. I love this one. Love your placing of depression as a good starting point for becoming grown up (both as individuals and as a nation).

The onset of adolescence is marked by adjustment reactions that are “related to successful and unsuccessful efforts to effect a reorientation that attempts both to rework the distorted directions of previous developmental errors and progressively to achieve future characterological stability.” (Feinstein, 1971)

Have you ever tried to tell a petulant, sombre, confused teenager that it’s something we all have to go through, that we need to experience, to move forward and grow?

It’s almost impossible to say the right thing. But every parent knows that’s not the point. It’s about listening, paying attention, making the effort, sharing that beer, and handing over your car keys from time to time.

South Africa is such an odd place. I need only step over the border and I can cut through the tension with a knife. The pussy footing around the issues is almost comical. The whole Rainbow Nation spiel, I think, is where it started to go egg shaped. It was so easy to grab onto it with white knuckled hands and fly away from reality. Now you have the fools on the hill trying to bring out the much needed discussion but like most fools, the sensible ignore them. You are right, it is time to push away the crap and get dirty. And too, sometimes things falling apart a bit is not such a bad thing as the limiting choices force people to act.

What an interesting comment — it reminds me of the first time I left SA as an adult, for a student holiday in Zimbabwe. Crossing the border out of here, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders; coming home, it settled right back in again. We’re the kind of massively dysfunctional family where everyone walks on eggshells trying to avoid the explosion that inevitably erupts anyway, but which resolves nothing — so we go back to tiptoeing again. On my blacker days I joke that it is actually not possible to have a simple conversation in this country — you practically can’t say “hello” without the word immediately staggering under the weight of history, assumptions, prejudices, stereotypes and projections. Proper conversation requires at least two kinds of trust: one, that the speaker will say more or less what she actually means — that there are no additional layers of code to decipher. Second, that the listener will hear what is said, not what she imagines the speaker to intend. We are in short supply of both these kinds of trust. How does one put an entire nation in therapy?

It all can be so depressing. I feel the problem is that South Africa in general has not recognised and accepted yet that we are a massively dysfunctional family. This would be the first step required. And then there would need to be confession, so that we can recognise each other, and perhaps the self in each other. But that’s the rub – that confession.

We as a country have not recognised yet that, beyond the economic deprivations and countless everyday humiliations of colonial and apartheid history, racism also caused hurt. Heartsore because of rejection, analogous to the heartbreak of a love rejected.

Oh Rustum, a love rejected. That feels right. But how bout the other side: Secretly I Will Love You More. (?) (That’s a quote). It’s so not simple, our family dynamics. Andries, I followed your link, I listened to it, there was Redi Direko, dealing with poor Shivimbu (bless him) her sweet direct voice getting very cross but just persisting in her line of march, not giving up or giving in or being rude, just going on and on, not letting him get away with what what, persisting in her job: I found this very far from depressing, even if it was and is in the cause of the depressive position Capital Letters it was wonderful. Because love is a very broad church. And in her persistence was a kind of loving too. Let’s follow all the threads, let’s keep paying attention and feeling.

Thanks Ray. Yes, it is a useful concept. Though I draw here on the notion of antagonism as explored by Laclau & Mouffe. It’s related to the notion of the dialectic, but it does not presume resolution through a neat ‘synthesis’.

Hello again
having today been pondering two items in the media, the issue of Seth Nthai and Communications Minister Siphiwe Nyanda, alongside a third which involved the beating of a group of migrant vendors in Pretoria by a private security company by the name of Ubuntu Security. I was becoming overwhelmingly grim about the unstoppable taint of corruption and brutality in South Africa today, disappointed I suppose. And being Zimbabwean originally, and a South African resident for 7 years, I feel so very regional about it.
To see what commentary I could find on the subject, in the hope of an antidote to my despair, I paid your page a visit and found this. I read the comments I wanted to say thank you for the excellent work. Food for thought. I even laughed out loud.